Konstantinos Tzelepis is a Phd student at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Unicersity of Cambridge.
He was born and raised in Peiraias, Greece. He studied Biomedical Sciences at TEI Athens and Human Neoplastic Disease (Cancer studies) in the Medical School of Athens. After his studies in Greece, he was given the opportunity to continue his studies in Biomedical research in Singapore. Subsequently, he was accepted in the 4-year PhD program at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
“I would love to return back to Greece but science is a very competitive field and unfortunately at the moment my country doesn’t have the standards to follow that competition. Hence, it wouldn’t have been wise to leave Cambridge, especially now that, after a lot of hard work and sacrifices, I start seeing the results of my efforts” K. Tzelepis said in an interview at ellines.com.
In October 2016 the team of scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in which he participated as a principal investigator, adapted a CRISPR gene editing technique and used it to find new therapeutic targets for acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). In the research published in Cell Reports, the team identifies a large number of genes that could serve as potential targets for anti-AML treatments and describe how inhibition of one of these genes, KAT2A, destroys AML cells without harming non-leukaemic blood cells.
“My main research focus is to identify novel biological pathways and therapies for AML using advanced biotechnology tools such as CRISPR-Cas9 technologies. In our current published paper we show that by improving and customizing the CRISPR technology, we were able to create a comprehensive catalogue of genes, essential for AML” he added in the interview.
